Column: Urine for cash – all part of a quality education

Published: Monday, January 28, 2013 at 05:46 PM.

I have no recollection of the toothpaste test, but this thing about collecting one’s urine is something that’s hard to forget.

The other thing I remember about it all is that during the school day the jugs holding the urine were kept in a room across from the bathroom. When we got a break, we’d grab our jugs — our names were written on the bags — and head to the urinals.

Whoever oversaw this thing hired an old man who accompanied us to the bathroom. (Looking back, this story just keeps getting better.) He didn’t watch us, just stood and stared straight ahead as something of a bathroom monitor.

One day I accidentally knocked over my jug and urine spilled on the floor. I cleaned things as best I could, then reported to Weird Old Man Standing by the Door what happened. He never responded, just kept staring straight ahead.

For the remainder of the week, I worried I wouldn’t get my dollar because “they” would figure out they hadn’t collected every ounce of my urine as was spelled out in the contract. I still remember the day we lined up for our pay and I was presented a dollar along with all the other boys.

When I was in the fourth grade, a dollar was a big deal.

I called the central offices of the Alamance-Burlington School System the other day to get their take on the urine-for-cash affair, but they stonewalled me — no doubt sensing a decades-long lawsuit in the works.

When I was in fourth grade, the other boys in my class at Eastlawn Elementary and I were paid $1 apiece to collect our urine for a week.

My mother is convinced this is all a figment of my imagination, but I confirmed it with a couple of former classmates. Besides, it’s one of those stories too good to make up.

It was around 1967. Memories fade, but I vaguely recall the boys in my class being separated from the girls one day while some gentleman explained the master plan to us. We were given plastic gallon jugs and told to pee in them for a week. If we filled one, we got another.

We were given very specific instructions that we were to use the jugs each time we went to the bathroom and if we didn’t “they” (I have no idea who “they” were) would know and we wouldn’t get our dollar.

We trucked the jugs back and forth to school in brown paper bags. We were told not to tell the girls what was going on, but — girls being girls — they figured it out.

Gary Rogers was in my class and lived down the street from me on North Ashland Drive. I still speak with Gary by phone once a week or so. He’s so old he’s retired from the city of High Point, where he worked in the recreation and parks department.

I called Gary the other day and asked if he remembered the urine-collecting scandal. He said he thought it was part of a toothpaste test in which our class was involved. Your guess is as good as mine as to how a fourth-grader’s urine might be linked to a test involving toothpaste.

I have no recollection of the toothpaste test, but this thing about collecting one’s urine is something that’s hard to forget.

The other thing I remember about it all is that during the school day the jugs holding the urine were kept in a room across from the bathroom. When we got a break, we’d grab our jugs — our names were written on the bags — and head to the urinals.

Whoever oversaw this thing hired an old man who accompanied us to the bathroom. (Looking back, this story just keeps getting better.) He didn’t watch us, just stood and stared straight ahead as something of a bathroom monitor.

One day I accidentally knocked over my jug and urine spilled on the floor. I cleaned things as best I could, then reported to Weird Old Man Standing by the Door what happened. He never responded, just kept staring straight ahead.

For the remainder of the week, I worried I wouldn’t get my dollar because “they” would figure out they hadn’t collected every ounce of my urine as was spelled out in the contract. I still remember the day we lined up for our pay and I was presented a dollar along with all the other boys.

When I was in the fourth grade, a dollar was a big deal.

I called the central offices of the Alamance-Burlington School System the other day to get their take on the urine-for-cash affair, but they stonewalled me — no doubt sensing a decades-long lawsuit in the works.

It’s a great story — one I can’t imagine happening today.

When not peeing in a jug, Steve Huffman is a staff writer for the Times-News. Reach him at shuffman@thetimesnews.com.